Among the 15 Irish citizens detained was Dr Margaret Connolly, the sister of Irish President Catherine Connolly – as well as Belfast man Fra Hughes and Lurgan woman Helena Kearns.<\/p>\n
In a statement on Thursday, a spokesman for Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said: “All foreign activists from the PR flotilla have been deported from Israel.<\/p>\n
“Israel will not permit any breach of the lawful naval blockade on Gaza.”<\/p>\n
On Friday morning Ireland’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Helen McEntee, confirmed that the Irish citizens are safely in Turkey.<\/p>\n
“Pleased to report that our flotilla citizens are safe in Istanbul and are recovering,” she said.<\/p>\n
“I assure their loved ones that officials from our embassy will continue to provide appropriate consular assistance and support.”<\/p>\n
After arriving in Turkey, Dr Margaret Connolly said of Israel: “This barbaric, cruel regime must be disbanded.”<\/p>\n
Mikey Cullen, another Irish activist who was also on board the flotilla, said that when they were intercepted they were met with violence.<\/p>\n
“And the fact that Israel would do that to us with the world on us, I can only imagine what they do to Palestinian prisoners,” RT\u00c9 has reported.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Among the 15 Irish citizens detained was Dr Margaret Connolly, the sister of Irish President Catherine Connolly –…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":598005,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-598004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=598004"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598004\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/598005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=598004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=598004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=598004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}